prefs sync

["Havoc Pennington" <hp pobox com>]

My notes here: http://live.gnome.org/OnlineDesktop/PrefsSync

(pasted below for convenience)

If you have thoughts, follow up...

Havoc

wiki page paste:

The goal is to store selected preferences on the server.

On the server side, we have a simple key-value hash (keys and values
are strings) for each user, table is ?DesktopSetting.

The current python hack watches for gconf changes and uploads them to
the server.

Desirable enhancements to the current hack:

    * correctly use schemas to get the data type; right now pygconf is
missing some needed API
    * add an automatic "priming" step that collects prefs the user has
changed from the default and uploads them the first time
    * support per-machine not only global scope, e.g. bigboard stocks
to display is probably per-machine
    * properly watch for the ?OnlinePreferencesManager to come and go
(or just use data model directly?)
    * allow apps to provide their whitelist entry themselves, so there
isn't a central file to maintain
    * try to download settings before we start to display the rest of
the desktop on login
    * have some way to toggle whether to save settings online

Priming:

    * just store a flag for whether we've ever "primed," seems
simplest; to prime, upload all whitelisted settings that have been
modified from the defaults

Per-machine:

    * store stuff under machine uuid

Whitelist entries:

    * install files like <online_key name="/apps/metacity/*" scope="global"/>